Using Summer Engagement with Students as Powerful Predictor of Future Success

The Real Reason Why Students Get Summer Off

Summer holds a unique place in the history of the U.S. and education – but not for the reason most people think. Most people believe that schools were off in the summer to help with the crops. However, in the early 1800s, children in rural America were needed more for spring planting and fall harvesting than they were needed in the summer. In fact, children in urban areas often went to school year-round.

In the mid-1800s, with the advancement of uniform schooling, wealthy urbanites argued that not only did children need rest from being overworked, but that they were suffering in hot, non-air-conditioned schools. Even doctors warned that too much schooling could lead to “nervous disorders” or “mental fatigue.” Air conditioning did not become common in most schools until the 1990s (I didn’t have it in my high school in the 1980s – and we school ended in mid-June – it was hard to concentrate when it was 100F).

What is Summer Learning Loss?

Summer learning loss, or the “summer slide,” refers to the decline in academic skills and knowledge that students may experience during the summer break when they are not engaged in formal education. This disparity is even greater for low-income students as their parental oversight and enrichment activities (camps, trips, etc.) are not matched by the children of the wealthy. One study showed that by the end of fifth grade, cumulative summer learning losses can leave low-income students two to three years behind their peers.

Addressing Summer Doldrums

Up until the late 1990s, most universities sponsored orientation programs the week before the semester started. This allowed for students to have their summers to do whatever they wanted. When I went to college in the late 1980s, the 3-4 days of August orientation were remembered as bliss because there was no homework and it seemed like everyone was enjoying their newfound freedom by partying. I don’t remember anything educational – but I do remember UB40 and Bruce Hornsby in concert!

At some point, universities that were losing out on top students to colleges with better reputations (which is what all early college rankings were based on), started to sponsor orientation in July. The result was that not only were students more likely to quickly acclimate to and enjoy college, but also that students were less likely to attend another college’s summer orientation and decide that they should go there instead.

One Story of Consistent, Intentional, and Meaningful Summer Connection

When I began overseeing a new student programs department in 2010 I stepped into a high functioning orientation system. We had moved a 2-day, 1-night, academic orientation from July to June, bringing new students and parents to campus right after high school graduation to get them excited and enroll in all their classes 2 months in advance. Students knew that the sooner they came to June Orientation, the better the pick of fall classes they would have so we had parents and students anxiously awaiting the day in February where we opened online registration for June Orientation. Within a day, they would quickly fill up the first couple of our ten, 300-student orientation sessions.

Second, we offered a 5-day, 4-night extended orientation in June and July where we invited only the students and offered them the closest thing we could to a Disneyland experience. This included putting them up in some of our nicest residence halls, bringing in some of the most entertaining faculty, and renting travel buses for a road trip to our original campus, where we served them a Texas BBQ dinner and had them walk silently down a luminaire-lined path at dusk for a special ceremony where they were given, as they walked under the original campus arches, a one-of-kind football jersey with their graduation year and personally selected nickname on the back.

Having discovered that the students who attended this extended orientation, called Line Camp, were yielded and retained at percentages much higher than those students who did not attend, resulted in the university subsidizing over 75% of the cost of the experience. We even had athletic coaches, at a Big XII Conference institution, sending their recruited athletes to our extended orientation to help seal the deal.

Then, in August, we offered the component of our summer program, Welcome Week, a multi-day experience that further accelerated students’ social and academic integration to campus. By the time students returned to college for Welcome Week (and ultimately the start of college), they had been chatting in groups with each other online for two months and often ran to hug each as they arrived to college. It was a dramatic shift from the nervous and scared freshman I remember seeing when I was dropped off at college. These students were counting down the days to when they would be back at college with their Line Camp friends.

We supplemented these 3 summer experiences by designing, in conjunction with a 3^rd party company, a customized series of on-line modules that further messaged our core messages from the in-person experiences. Last, but certainly not least, we spent much of the academic year running an extremely competitive process for selecting a group of ~50 summer student leaders who took a spring semester 3-credit leadership class that taught them how to build strong relationships and engage with small groups of students throughout the summer. These student leaders were paid well for their work serving on the front lines of student interaction in the summer.

Although we started with four full-time professionals when I arrived in 2010, by the time I left we had eight full-time staff overseeing these experiences. Our annual budget was several million dollars (including salaries).

I don’t share this because I want you to replicate the work of the last example – because we were summer engagement on steroids and the university was generous in its support of our efforts. That said, we were careful to involve the university leaders and board members in many of our highest profile summer events, resulting in many of them catching the spirit and wanting to further financially support our efforts. (some of our events allowed for only 2-3 specially invited guests in which I, as dean, would narrate and shepherd them through the experience.)

What Are Your Summer Touchpoints?

I say all of this because I want us to think about the intentionality, personalization, and comprehensiveness of our summer touch points for students. In order to help us do this, I created an Inventory of Summer Engagement Touchpoints that I suggest we ask ourselves. In answering these questions, ideally in a small group of your summer orientation champions, you should be able to identify where you are doing well and where you have room to improve.

Inventory of Summer Engagement Touchpoints

Outreach

1. Who has access to and when do they have access to incoming student emails?
2. Who is reaching out to incoming students, when are they doing this, and how often are they doing this?
3. Who has studied the overall content of the messages incoming students are receiving from the university? What are the major messages students are receiving?
4. Who has taken a comprehensive look at the number of emails and other outreach incoming students receive from the university in the summer? Has anyone sought to pace outreach so as not to overwhelm students?
5. Who is measuring and evaluating the extent to which summer messaging to students is opened and read?
6. Have you tried to assess if students remember, when they come to college, what you were trying to message?  

Resources

• What resources (staff, websites, etc.) from the university are being shared with students in the summer?  What resources are not being shared that might benefit students?  
• What resources that are being shared are students actually accessing and using? Has anyone tracked website hits, phone calls, chatbots, etc. to see what is being viewed, asked, and requested?
• Has anyone organized a list of the commonly asked questions from students in the summer? What do these questions or electronic queries tell us about what we need to do a better job communicating?  
• When we examine how the most requested topics are presented to students, are there methods for more effectively sharing this information that might improve student satisfaction and understanding?

Academic/Career Prep

1. What tools does the university provide to help students in the summer (or earlier) to identify their preferred major and courses of study?
2. What tools does the university offer to give students a realistic perspective on the careers that might emerge their preferred majors?
3. How does the university use student interest in majors, courses, and careers to improve the summer advising experience?
4. Who, from the university, is having a real-time, in-person or video conversations with students to demonstrate the university’s interest in students’ potential majors and careers?
5. Has the university tapped into the wide array of AI-supported academic and career guidance to increase impactful summer student touchpoints and strengthen meaningful advising?

Supportive Research

In a 2015 paper entitled, Identity theory as a theoretical framework to understand attrition for university students in transition,  Robert and Patricia Whannell make the case for ongoing student support through periods of transition. 

“The most important aspect of this approach to theorising the identity-related processes that influence the decision to continue or discontinue university study is that the emotional commitment is associated with the individual’s identity, not with the associated role. This view has a number of implications that are important when dealing with students in academic transition. Firstly, attempts to support students in transition that address the academic role aspect only—for example, study behaviours, time management—have a limited capacity to influence the process. That is, simply instructing someone on how to be a university student by performing the required role will not suffice. Any instruction that targets the skills associated with the academic role must also involve an appropriately supported opportunity for the student to demonstrate some form of mastery in the application of these skills in order to develop and strengthen the emotional commitment to their academic identity.

Usher and Pajares (2008), in a literature review intended to identify sources of academic self-efficacy, highlighted that this mastery does not need to be demonstrated in academically challenging situations. Under this framework, the goal for university staff is not only to work with students to strengthen the new academic identity of being a university student but also to develop the associated academic role during the transition period into undergraduate study, rather than the delivery of subject content and/or assess the “worthiness” of the individual to be a university student through assessment.

For this reason, there needs to be early opportunities for each student to develop strong, supportive relationships with peers through orientation programs at both the university and individual course level. Even more importantly, the academic staff who instruct courses that involve a substantial number of students transitioning into university, should be carefully chosen. Such staff should possess or given the opportunity to develop a strong student-centered, socio-cultural philosophy of education with appropriate training directed towards understanding the processes involved in supporting students in transition.”

Wrap Up

I hope your university’s answers to these questions help you offer a more holistic, personalized, and intentional investment in your incoming students’ summer experience. I can assure you that if you do focus on these questions, not only will your students begin to realize that you sincerely care about their college experience, but they will be more excited than ever to come to college and discover even more meaningful connections in their new home.

Originally published on Deep Thoughts on Higher Ed on May 8, 2025.